Selected in the period 2020 - 2024, 37 works in "Nocturne" by artist Dang Duong Bang are the quiet sounds of a moonlit night, allowing us to hear the sound of dragonflies flying. They can also be the music that takes us back to our childhood or love songs to remember someone.
Talking about Nocturne (Magical Night Song - 2024), artist Dang Duong Bang shared: “I started my painting career in 1974 as a member of the Hanoi Fine Arts Association. After exactly 50 years, Nocturne is my gratitude to Hanoi, my beloved homeland, an image that always resides in my heart, in my dreams and in every stroke of my sleepless nights.”
Nocturne is the male artist's first exhibition in his hometown of Hanoi after nearly four decades of living and working in Europe.
This “Nocturne” exhibition also introduces a memoir about Dang Duong Bang’s life and art. “Thuong nho 13”, a memoir (Vietnamese - English) presented in artbook format, encapsulates the portrait of a gallant artist of old Hanoi. A person who has lived in exile for nearly half of his life, but still keeps for himself 12 seasons to remember and love Hanoi and the remaining season to explore and enrich his love for art and life.
In the inspiration of magical night melodies, 37 works at the exhibition “Nocturne” 2024 mark half a century of painting by artist Dang Duong Bang
Artist Dang Duong Bang is the nephew of the famous painter Nguyen Tien Chung and studied painting with painter Pham Viet Song - breathing into his paintings the soulful shapes of boats and moonlight like the painters of the Indochina Fine Arts School generation. Dang Duong Bang (1951) is currently a Professor of Nanotechnology in Food Safety at the Polytechnic University, Denmark. However, he is better known to the public and art lovers in Europe as a painter, "a person who skillfully combines tradition and modernity in contemporary Vietnamese fine arts".
Hanoi, flowers, women often appear in the paintings of male artists.
Parallel to his two jobs as a teacher and a painter, for Dang Duong Bang, these are two different jobs that are difficult to compare. During the day he does science, at night he paints. These two activities seem unrelated but make his life happy. If painting is the salvation that helps the male artist overcome stress in his research work, then science helps his paintings have new ways of posing problems. Dang Duong Bang always uses the thinking of a scientist to renew art through experiments, research or new ways of posing problems. “Painting is the way to help me calm down, relieve stress and regain balance in life. Painting is the way to help me make up for missing my hometown. Painting is also the way to help me face myself, purify, and wash away distracting thoughts. Every time I finish painting, I sleep well because painting gives me beautiful dreams.”
Reporter (PV): Your paintings often capture the beauty of ordinary moments. Can you share what specific experiences inspired the works in this exhibition?
Dang Duong Bang:I believe that life will be more beautiful when we see beauty in the simplest things, and artists are the ones who help people realize that through their art. For me, a beautiful life is made up of many beautiful moments and when we can preserve them for a long time. The idea that comes to me can be a moment of changing seasons, when the weather turns cold or rains, it can be a song by Phu Quang, Trinh Cong Son about Hanoi, it can be a strange dream...
However, expressing the beauty of ordinary moments is never easy in painting. Because the biggest challenge for an artist is to express something that everyone knows in a unique artistic language so that those moments are unique and immortal.
Painter Dang Duong Bang said: "Ego is extremely important in painting"
PV: Why do Hanoi, flowers, women and cats appear so often in your paintings? What personal meaning do these themes have for you?
Dang Duong Bang:I paint to relieve my homesickness, my Hanoi, my mother and her Siamese cat are the most peaceful memories that soothe me. The beauty of a woman in ao dai always makes me think of my mother and the “cat” is me, lying in my mother’s arms.
PV: You use many different materials, from oil paint to recycled paper. What made you choose these materials for the exhibition and how do they contribute to the message of the work?
Dang Duong Bang:I think that “ego” is extremely important in painting. “Ego” is the individual style, helping the audience recognize the individual “voice” of an artist among thousands of artists. The way I “play” with different materials is also the way to find my ego in art.
With the mindset of a scientist, I always like to experiment to find new things. When I lived in Europe, I did not have the conditions to make traditional lacquer paintings. I experimented with making lacquer on new materials such as newspaper, on fabric mounted on newspaper. When I had painted many brilliant works, or expensive materials such as gold leaf, I wanted to challenge myself with minimalism.
With the same way of thinking as a scientist, I like to prove that beauty can come from things that seem cheap or discarded. I really enjoy drawing pictures on train tickets while traveling. I see the warm beauty in the cover of a pizza box, or the brown paper wrapping of breakfast bread. I see beautiful memories in a napkin, chocolate wrapper of a happy party, a concert ticket of a place that holds many memories. The creativity of an artist is not only finding beauty in precious materials but also seeing the beauty of the most ordinary things, and more miraculously, creating new life for things that seem to have been thrown away.
PV: Many of your works are in the collections of famous figures such as Elton John and Bill Gates' Gates Foundation. How does this recognition affect your approach to art?
Dang Duong Bang:My work is painting and the sale of paintings is done by galleries. The painting owned by Elton John is a painting in the series “The Beau and the Beast” in a charity auction project to support AIDS patients at Gallery Attitude, London (2012). The collection of 3 lotus and dragonfly paintings in the series “The sounds of silence” were paintings participating in the exhibition to support the charity activities of the Gate Foundation in New York (2010).
For me, all my art lovers bring me joy, no matter if they are celebrities or ordinary art lovers. However, what makes me happiest is that the paintings are bought by celebrities in charity art events, it is not only recognition, but more importantly, my art helps people in difficulty all over the world.
PV: Can you explain the significance of using crumpled newspaper as a medium in some of your paintings? How does this medium affect the way viewers perceive the work?
Dang Duong Bang:As I said above, I see history and events in newspapers. When I draw on newspapers, I see the beauty of it in its uniqueness. I usually do not cover the newspaper with all the colors or gold and silver, but I still leave a part of it. That is the life of an old newspaper that is not wasted, it has been used to create art.
Environmental protection and recycling are a global trend, especially in Europe. The trend of creating products from saving consumption, or bringing value to old objects is the premise for new products and painting as well as an artist like me is not outside that trend.
The beauty of crumpled works comes from the memory I once witnessed when Uncle Phai painted paintings that he was not satisfied with, then threw them away or burned them. When I visited him in Hanoi, I secretly kept those sketches, smoothed them out, and then gave them back to him after a while. I told him: “Maybe one day you will find them beautiful again, so don’t throw them away.” And it was true, I saw the material and life in the crumpled works, even the stains and erasures. It is like the wrinkles on a human face. If we love, we will love those wrinkles.
This exhibition "Nocturne" also launches a memoir about the life and art of Dang Duong Bang.
PV: How have experiences of loneliness and homesickness influenced your art?
Dang Duong Bang:I have lived away from home for nearly 40 years, so life in Denmark is almost too familiar and has become my second home. I miss home, my mother, my friends, the Vietnamese language and the loneliness in a cold, sparsely populated land with gray snow in winter. In a place where I miss the warmth of family during Tet, everything still happens as usual. But when I got used to that life, I felt happy because I had such beautiful sadness. Thinking about my mother and Hanoi might make me cry, but it is always the most beautiful and warmest feeling to cry.
The exhibition “Nocturne” takes place from October 24 to November 10 at 55 Van Mieu, Dong Da, Hanoi.
More information:
Living and working in Leiden (Netherlands) since 1990 and settling in Copenhagen (Denmark) since 1999, Dang Duong Bang has had 40 solo exhibitions in Copenhagen, Paris, Amsterdam, Leiden, London, New York, Tokyo, Seoul, Melbourne... More than 3,000 works have been created and belong to private collections in: Denmark, England, France, the Netherlands, Russia, Japan, Korea, China, Thailand, Hong Kong, Australia, Canada and the United States. Many of his works are in the collections of famous people such as Elton John, or displayed in public spaces such as Gates Foundation (New York), University of Copenhagen (Denmark), Odense University (Denmark), Den Danske Bank (Denmark), BRK Lyngby Art Foundation (Denmark)... In 2019, his first solo exhibition in Vietnam was held in Ho Chi Minh City - "Dream Wharf" with a sold-out record. All 55 works in 4 weeks of exhibition.
